Echoing the calls of an eager market place, Alaa Dalghan, General Manager, UAE for Advantech B+B SmartWorx Middle East and Africa, says customers want to see evidence of what actually IoT is capable of accomplishing across the world from industries to cities, heavy machinery to oil & gas and utilities.

Advantech B+B SmartWorx has certainly been active, with existing deployments across various sectors in transport, infrastructure, energy but also in smaller applications such as in kiosks and ATMs.

Some of the uses have major real world implications such as provision of water. Delivering clean water is a major global challenge and technology can help overcome some of these challenges.

B+B is working closely with governments and cities and decision makers from Chicago, to Dublin, to cities in the UAE, helping them come up with a model of their smart city.

“We help them start by defining what kind of services they want their citizens to enjoy in a Smart City, and once those are outlined, what are the technologies that can be implemented to help offer these services,” Dalghan says.

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In the region, B+B worked with electricity utility ADDC in Abu Dhabi to link newly-built substations with a central control room. ADDC faced the prospect of laying tens of kilometres of fibre linking the 200 substations to their central control room. The cost of doing this would have been exorbitant and equally important, ADDC wanted the system to operate immediately.

Instead, ADDC deployed smart cellular gateways from B+B, putting a gateway behind each substation and within a week they were able to monitor and control these substations.

Within the industry control systems and SCADA environments, M2M communications, the precursor to IoT, enabled machinery to communicate amongst each other. This communication was in silos however, sending data only amongst the machines themselves and only to its control software using a language only these equipment could understand.

With Internet of Things on the other hand, this communication is intra-systems, between many more components, explains Dalghan.

With a smart city, people want a city that utilises smart technology to enhance the lifestyle of the citizens of the city and to be friendly to the environment. The ideal smart city does not put technology at the fore, Dalghan concludes.